Ignite, SfB, Teams and UCDay

So if you are following industry news (and twitter!) there is a lot of speculation kicking around about the future of Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business. One of the reasons for this is that we are building up to Microsoft’s annual IT Pro tech conference (Ignite) and MS usually have some things hidden up their sleeve ready to reveal. We’re at that point in product life-cycles where we should be expecting some news about the next generation UC platforms.

There are some hints about what may be coming, if you take a look through the session lists for the conference there are some clues in the session abstracts talking about SfB server v.next, Microsoft Phone System and what looks like a big emphasis being placed on Teams. Now if you think about it MS emphasising Teams isn’t that much of a surprise, it’s their play at a “modern” collaboration platform to not only compete with the likes of Slack but to act as a front end to other O365 services. By using Teams you are using SharePoint, Onedrive for Business, Planner, OneNote, Groups, SfB (sort of) and all without having to care about configuring or setting these things up.

So what does this have to do with Ignite and UCDay? Turns out that my employer (Modality Systems) is a sponsor at Ignite and as it fits into my current job remit I’ve been lucky enough to secure one of their included attendee tickets so I will at the conference! I’m hoping to be able to learn straight from the horse’s mouth what the future of SfB and Teams will be and then start determining how any announced changes & roadmap features impact existing SfB users (either on-prem or online).

So UCDay? Well, before I knew I was able to attend Ignite I submitted a session to talk about:

Microsoft Teams: Your Collaboration “Desktop”

Microsoft Teams is one of the new kids on the block in the O365 productivity space pulling together the best elements of OneDrive, Skype, SharePoint and Exchange as well as integrating other platforms and technologies. Teams represents the next evolutionary step in Microsoft’s collaboration roadmap. It has the potential to “revolutionise” how organisations work and collaborate on projects by becoming one of the most important & frequently used tools in the workplace. Log into your computer (or smartphone), launch Teams and have immediate access to 90% of the information and documents needed for the working day.

In this talk Ben Lee (Principal Consultant for Modality Systems) will recap on what Teams is, how it builds on existing Microsoft platforms and how it can integrate with other services as well as covering recent Teams developments. We will also look at how you can build and apply a collaboration strategy placing Teams at its core.

I’m delighted that mine was one of 5 sessions selected for the SfB track and I hope with my Ignite experience that I’ll be able to add even more value and insight to my talk.

If you don’t know UCDay is a UK community driven all day event covering most things Microsoft Cloud orientated. It’s free to attend as our sponsors cover the costs. If you are an IT Pro, IT Decision maker or Developer using Microsoft Cloud technologies you really want to get yourself along. Tickets have been moving quickly now that the full session lists have been announced but you can still register from the main page – here.

Let me know if you will going along and hopefully see you at my session 😉